Sir John Harvey-Jones
| Sir John Harvey-Jones | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 16 April 1924 Hackney, London, England, UK |
| Died | 9 January 2008 (aged 83) Hereford, Herefordshire, England, UK |
| Allegiance |
 United Kingdom
|
| Service/branch |
 Royal Navy
|
| Years of service | 1937–1956 |
| Battles/wars |
World War II Cold War |
| Awards | MBE |
| Other work | Company director, television presenter, author and university chancellor |
Sir John Harvey-Jones MBE (16 April 1924 – 9 January 2008) was an English businessman. He was the chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries from 1982 to 1987. He was best known by the public for his BBC television show, Troubleshooter, in which he advised struggling businesses.
John Henry Harvey-Jones was born in Hackney, London, but spent most of his early childhood in Dhar, India, where his father was a guardian to a teenage maharajah. He was shipped back to Britain at age six to attend a prep school at Deal, Kent. He entered Dartmouth Royal Naval College at age 13.
Harvey-Jones joined Dartmouth Royal Naval College as a cadet in 1937, and in 1940, at the age of 16, he joined HMS Diomede as a midshipman. The next two ships that he served with, HMS Ithuriel and HMS Quentin, were sunk by enemy action. Harvey-Jones went on to join the submarine service in 1942, and received his first command at age 24.
With the end of World War II, Harvey-Jones went to the University of Cambridge to learn Russian in six months and joined Naval Intelligence as an interpreter. He married Mary Bignell in 1947, and he commanded the Russian intelligence section under the guise of the "British Baltic Fishery Protection Service", which used two ex-German E-boats for gathering clandestine intelligence on the Soviet Baltic Fleet. Rising to the rank of lieutenant-commander, Harvey-Jones was awarded a military MBE in 1952 for his work in Naval Intelligence, although his citation stated that the award was for "fishery protection duties in the Baltic".
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